‘Search Party’ Co-Creator Sarah-Violet Bliss on Her Lean, Mean Millennial Mystery
Now that Thanksgiving is over and done with, we’re back to our regularly scheduled programming of losing our minds about what is happening in the country right now. If there was ever a time when America needed an entertaining distraction, it would be now.
Enter Search Party: a viciously dark and hilarious take on entitled Brooklyn millennial culture, filtered through genre of a “missing girl” mystery story. The 10 episode series was released all at once on TBS (perfect for a binge-athon, preferably while hiding under the covers somewhere). At first glance, you could be forgiven for letting the network and coterie of self-absorbed, over-privileged, white 20-somethings fool you into thinking Search Party is another iteration of GIRLS. Such an assumption could easily be bolstered by the knowledge that the show’s co-creator, Sarah-Violet Bliss, not only went to the same Brooklyn private school as Lena Dunham, but the same college as well. (Full disclosure: I also attended Oberlin in the same class as Ms. Bliss.) Not to mention the fact that Bliss and her creative partner, Charles Rogers, won the Jury Award at SXSW in 2014 for their film Fort Tilden...a mere four years after Ms. Dunham’s Tiny Furniture won Best Narrative Feature at the same festival.
